


Fill the Long Night with Words

by unnieunnie



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Bad Decisions, Drunkenness, M/M, Poetry, Poets should never be trusted to take care of themselves, Questionable bartender, Questionable muse, Really extremely bad decisions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-28
Updated: 2019-11-28
Packaged: 2020-10-19 11:53:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20656811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unnieunnie/pseuds/unnieunnie
Summary: Words had deserted him - would he ever find poetry again? It seemed absurd that he might find inspiration in a glass, until Jongdae was visited by a man with eyes as green as the absinthe he drank, whose beauty and whose questions caused words to rise in him again.





	Fill the Long Night with Words

**Author's Note:**

> For prompt T120: the one that got away and then came back to me anyhow just to break my brain
> 
> \--------

<strike>Her beauty like the sun doth rise</strike>

<strike>and from my suff’ring heart will prise</strike>

<strike>Her beauty like the moon doth shine</strike>

<strike>upon the sea’s dark, roiling brine</strike>

<strike>Like starlight shines her pallid face</strike>

<strike>writing this is nought but waste</strike>

Jongdae very carefully and thoroughly scribbled over the entire page of his notepad until it shone from the layer of graphite from his pencil. As satisfying as it was to obliterate his wretched attempts, the action did nothing to appease his opinion that poetry was the most wretched way to spend time ever invented by humankind.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t anything else he wanted to do.

And having spent the preceding year dining out on other people’s accounts on the strength of his debut collection, _At the End of This Loneliness_, he had a taste for poetry, a taste for (moderate) fame. Nothing else seemed worth his time.

If only he had anything to say.

“Transitioning from poetry to abstract art?” Yixing asked from behind the zinc of the bartop.

Jongdae scowled at him.

“I can’t find it,” he said. “No matter where I look, it’s just not there anymore.”

“Your poetry?”

Jongdae nodded. Yixing wiped the bar with a grimy-looking cloth, circles upon circles, and Jongdae knew that a year before, he would’ve had something to say about it, about repetition and futility, maybe about using something dirty to pretend to become clean ...

But now his head was empty.

“What drove you to it, before?” Yixing asked.

It was early; the bar was nearly empty at this hour. Except at the zenith of his paltry fame, Jongdae could never abide the hours his fellow artists kept. Night at home was where the words rose up out of darkness and silence.

But Yixing was familiar and friendly, and Jongdae was desperate for some good advice.

It sounded ridiculous to say aloud, but what did he have to lose? Maybe if Yixing laughed at him, the shame would be enough to spark a poem.

Jongdae described the night of his 21st birthday, waking alone in the middle of the night and wandering as if compelled into the wood behind his parents’ small holding, and the being he found there: tall and impossibly beautiful, with long hair and indeterminate robes so that Jongdae never knew whether they were a man or woman, crowned in silver lights that bobbed around their tall, furred ears.

“Interesting,” Yixing said. “Did they touch you?”

Jongdae nodded, but he could never say it aloud, the icy burn of their hand cupped around his cheek, how he had shuddered.

“Look at your pretty mouth, little mortal,” they had said, and laid one freezing thumb against his bottom lip.

It still ached sometimes.

“Fairy-touched,” Yixing said. “No wonder you took up poetry.”

Jongdae opened his mouth and closed it again. What a thing to say, “fairy-touched.”

Even if that’s what it felt like, one didn’t say such things aloud.

“I can’t give you inspiration, but I can maybe help you crack the door,” Yixing said.

Jongdae stared at him.

“What does that mean?”

Yixing set in front of him a tall glass with a weird little bubble in the stem and poured some bright green liquid into it, to the top of the bubble. He set a slotted spoon over the top of the glass, put a sugar cube on top of it, and dripped water over everything. The poison-green liquid turned milky and pale.

“Absinthe,” Jongdae said.

Yixing grinned.

“The green fairy. They say it’s poison, but you know it’s simply very strong.”

Jongdae took a sip and grimaced at the bitterness of the licorice flavor.

“So inspiration means getting violently drunk? That’d be nicer on champagne.”

“It might be,” Yixing said. “But this bottle’s from a special distiller. I wouldn’t give it to just anyone. Bottoms up.”

Jongdae drank.

He must’ve drunk even more, because the next thing he remembered, he was slouched over a table speaking to a man with eyes as green as absinthe straight out of the bottle.

Jongdae braced his chin on wobbly elbows and tried to make the man’s face stop drifting in a circle. Had he ever seen anyone so beautiful before? There was someone once, but Jongdae couldn’t remember whom: not with this heart-shaped face in front of him, those vivid eyes and matching cravat, the crooked smile.

“From whence does poetry arise?” the man said.

His voice was light and slightly burred. Jongdae wanted to be the one asking the questions so he could hear it some more.

“You won’t answer?” the beautiful man asked.

Jongdae tried to gather language from all the various corners of his liquor-stretched mind.

“From the place under civilization,” he said, “the part of us that remains connected to the wind and the trees and the lightning.”

“And are you? Connected to the lightning?” the man asked.

Jongdae nodded, even though his head felt as if it weighed the same as a boulder, and moving it made the man have four beautiful faces.

“Oh yes,” he said. “Sometimes, when I walk in the wind, preparing to write, I feel that I _am_ the lightning, as if I could strike the ground and have it split under my hand.”

“Do you, now.”

“It’s all gone, though,” Jongdae mumbled into his glass.

It was a different kind of glass. The liquid in it wasn’t the right color. It was brown, like weakly steeped tea. Wasn’t it supposed to be something else? Green, like the beautiful man’s eyes.

“Don’t worry, little poet,” the man said.

Oh, his face was awfully close, wasn’t it? Up close, it didn’t move so much, and it was even more beautiful. Jongdae dreamed that he lifted one hand and placed it against a marble-cold cheek. Thank heaven he was too drunk to actually do such a thing.

The man smelled of anise. His eyes were such a bright green that they seemed to glow.

“The first step onto the path is quite disorienting, is it not? Let’s put you safe in your little mortal bed and see whether you wish to take a second.”

The next thing Jongdae knew was the street, air smelling fresh as if after a rain: shiny, dark cobblestones, an arm around his waist strong as an anchor rope, the yowl of mating cats. The scent of anise.

A blank spot, then cold hands on his chest. The rough sheets of his bed. Green eyes smiling down at him. One point of cold burning into the center of his forehead.

“Sleep, my poet,” a burred voice said.

> From whence does poetry arise?
> 
> You ask me, though you already know.
> 
> I see truth in your malachite eyes,
> 
> those from whence poetry will arise.
> 
> Can I trust that you will not tell me lies,
> 
> nor drain me of all color like the snow:
> 
> you from whence poetry might arise,
> 
> you, who ask questions whose answers you already know.

Jongdae stared at the column of lines above his pencil, and the pounding in his head receded slightly.

It wasn’t brilliant. But it _was_ a poem, the first he had written in months, and nothing to be ashamed of. Jongdae blessed Yixing and his mysterious conversationalist and copied the poem in his notebook in proper ink.

“Back again?” Yixing asked.

“There was a man,” Jongdae said. “I talked with him last night. He had green eyes, did you see him?”

“I’m sorry, we were very busy last night,” Yixing said.

Jongdae scratched at the zinc bar top.

“Maybe he’ll come back,” Yixing said.

“Maybe,” Jongdae said through a pall of gloom.

“Another go with the green fairy?”

It tasted no better the second time, though at least Jongdae knew it was coming: bitterness, the sting, the world losing its moorings. He looked up through a haze into eyes the green of summer sunlight on oak leaves.

“Pretty mortal,” the man said. “Tell me what you need from poetry.”

“You came back.”

Jongdae felt a cold hand burn, cupping his cheek.

“What do you need?”

Jongdae leaned into the chill of the man’s hand, to stop the world from heaving like storm-tossed waves. What did he need?

He needed the way his heart seemed to seize up in his chest just before the words broke free. He needed the transcendent emptiness of being stopped in his tracks by a shaft of light across stone. He needed the music of it. The satisfaction of finding just the right image, rich and filling as a meal. He needed the scratch of a nib against paper, the scent of paper, the sight of ink feathering into fibers. The round flavor of powerful words on his tongue. The feeling, when he looked at his words on a page, that he was akin to a small god, that he had created a tiny world complete in itself.

The man leaned in until all Jongdae could see was the green of his eyes.

“Say it.”

“I need everything,” Jongdae said.

Lips against his own, cold and tasting of anise. That chill hand wrapped around his nape. The man’s mouth drew back, and Jongdae chased it, but alcohol had him too tight in its clutches, and he would’ve fallen out of his chair if the man hadn’t caught him.

The man’s smile was like moonlight on snow. His hands held Jongdae against a broad, firm chest. Looking at him made the same hum in the back of Jongdae’s head as writing.

The noise and smoke of the bar faded, less important than half-forgotten dreams compared to the man in front of him and the licorice-flavored ringing in his ears.

“More,” he said.

“Not here,” the man said. “My sweet poet.”

The stench of a hot summer night (garbage, cheap wine, piss). An arm like a steel band around his waist. Pale skin under a streetlamp. The familiar mildew scent of his building, 57 stairs, and that mouth on his again, cold at first, fingers like a vise on his chin. Chill hands on his chest, a delicious pain at his neck, in his ass, and a buzzing sound, like wings.

A face with too-round, too-black, too-large eyes atop too long a neck, and yes: wings buzzing.

“God save me,” Jongdae thought, but before the horror of it could take him, he was coming, and then he knew nothing else.

> Let me tell you the things that I need,
> 
> all the songs that speak to my soul.
> 
> What do I need to make myself whole?
> 
> On what nectar can my quivering soul feed?
> 
> Do not condemn my feverish screed –
> 
> listening as tender as a new-born foal
> 
> to the song of the things that I need,
> 
> the songs that speak to my soul.
> 
> How will this heart be freed?
> 
> Tell me the lines of my role.
> 
> Will you levy some horrible toll,
> 
> Cut me open so that I can bleed?
> 
> Let me tell you the things that I need,
> 
> find the songs that sing of my soul.

Jongdae laid his pen down and watched the shine of wet ink fade into the paper.

It was a poem slightly better than the last, and his hangover was nothing like it should’ve been for the profound state of intoxication he had reached the night before. But he was uneasy.

He had absolutely lain with someone last night: the evidence was crusted on his belly when he woke, the scent of it in his sheets, fingerprints on his hips. That soreness that he usually counted as a pleasant reminder. A tender red mark on his lower neck with teeth prints in it.

It must’ve been the green-eyed man. Jongdae remembered kissing him, remembered _wanting_ with his whole being and the touch of chill hands.

Why, then, would he remember fear and wings?

This green fairy business was a highly unpleasant sort of drunk. Better stick to wine from now on. Surely, if they had slept together, the green-eyed man would return again. Jongdae vowed to be less drunk in that event, so he could remember more than the briefest snatches of conversation. Perhaps even remember the man’s name, what a wonder that would be.

He walked. After a day spent at his desk, the sunlight made low, golden shafts across emptying streets. His hand ached from gripping his pen for too many hours, his back from being hunched over. When he turned his head, the raw spot on his neck chafed.

And yet: these small pains were reminders that he was alive inside his body. He had forgotten it, for months locked inside his own head, chasing echoes of poems he had already written, instead of looking outward for new ones.

Jongdae stopped at the center of a bridge arched over a narrow canal. He clutched at the iron railing until it cooled his fingers, then laid them against his own neck. Memory flickered in him as during a storm, cold hands and a sharp-edged smile. Inspiration rising in him, the familiar tremble of an impending flood.

A dragonfly buzzed past his ear to land on the railing near his hand, wings quivering. Jongdae gasped at its closeness and the realization that it was as vividly green as his strange muse’s eyes. He stretched out his fingers and held them still; after a couple of breaths, the dragonfly lifted, circled in front of him, then landed on his hand.

If he concentrated, Jongdae could feel the delicate pressure of its feet tickling his skin.

“Will he come back?” Jongdae asked.

The dragonfly crawled over his fingers.

“I owe him a debt,” Jongdae said. “I want to show him my poems, I want him to _see_. And if – surely it can’t only have been the alcohol, I’ve been drunk a hundred times. It must be his questions, must it not? That let me find words again.”

The insect flew in front of him, jewel-green in the golden air, alighted on his frayed, ink-stained cuff.

“You don’t even know that you’re beautiful,” Jongdae murmured. “Such a small thing, the very color of his eyes. Perhaps you’re my good-luck charm that he’ll return to me.”

Jongdae watched the dragonfly fly into the last ray of lowering sun. He was at odds with himself – he wanted to go to the bar to find the green-eyed man, but he wanted a night with a clear mind, in case more words arose in him. He wanted to kiss the green-eyed man again and remember it properly. Wanted to write by candlelight with that dark head behind him on his pillow.

By some peculiar magic, the green-eyed man lounged against the wall by his door when Jongdae climbed the stairs to his flat.

“It’s you.”

Jongdae had halfway convinced himself that the man couldn’t possibly be as beautiful as the scraps of memory that drifted through his mind. Yet, in that dingy, malodorous hallway, sober as a deacon and under a flickering gaslamp, he discovered instead that the man looked almost unreal in his stillness and perfection. His eyes were in fact the vivid green of the absinthe bottle, the dragonfly. The gaslamp gave a greenish cast to his pale skin, a verdigris sheen to the dark hair up through which he stared at Jongdae over rounded cheeks, a pointed chin, a perfect moue of a mouth.

Jongdae remembered the chill of his touch and shivered, but not with cold.

“You found me,” he said.

The man smiled – a bare lift of one corner of his mouth, his eyes going to crescents.

“The past two nights in a row I’ve brought you home to your bed,” he said in a light voice.

The man stood from his slouch. Jongdae cataloged their similar slight height, the man’s breadth across his shoulders. The pale column of his neck above his collar.

“Though while you wear my marks on your skin, my poet, I can find you in any of the worlds above and below,” the man said, voice deeper and smile sharper. “Will you let them fade, I wonder? Or will you invite me to make more and remain one of my own?”

Was this man a poet himself? Who else would speak in such a manner? Jongdae wanted to throw himself on the man.

“Do with me what you will,” Jongdae said around the gravel in his throat. “I’ll be yours as long as you’ll have me.”

The man slid one chill hand slowly around Jongdae’s neck and pulled him forward.

“As long as that?” he murmured. “You might be dismayed to find yourself so long in my care.”

“Never.”

Those green eyes were as intoxicating as absinthe themselves. Already the world felt unsteady under Jongdae’s feet. He clutched at the man’s coat.

“I’m Jong -”

The man kissed him, insistent and rough, those cold fingers digging in next to his spine. Jongdae fell into it, let the man possess his mouth.

“Are you sure you want me to know your name?” the man whispered against his lips. “To have you marked means I can find you. To know your name means I own you.”

“I’ve already given you everything of myself,” Jongdae said. “My name is Jongdae.”

He pressed himself against the man’s form. The door, the door was right there, why had they not yet gone through it to rid themselves of all these blasted clothes?

“Oh no,” the man said, cupping Jongdae’s cheeks and kissing him again, but tenderly and slow. “Not everything. Not yet, my poet. Jongdae.”

How could the simple saying of his name undo him so completely? He may as well have been drunk, for all the coordination he had, stumbling through the door, dragging the man by one wrist. He may as well have spent another night guzzling Yixing’s absinthe, for the scent of anise around him and the vivid green of the man’s eyes.

His neck was chill under Jongdae’s lips. Under his clothes – higher quality than Jongdae’s own, not a loose thread to be found, a rich man’s clothes – he was so finely made, all beautiful angles and planes that invited one’s palm to skim across them.

His mouth was so insistent against Jongdae’s own, marking him over and over, with a whispered “my poet,” and “sweet Jongdae.”

“Tell me who you are,” Jongdae said, gazing up into that impossibly beautiful face.

Even the flesh surrounding him was cool, and he thrust up into it as if seeking respite on a summer day.

“You may call me Min,” the man said.

So that was the name Jongdae shouted when he found his release. The unreality of all of it was compounded by the way the candlelight made it seem that Min’s eyes went black when he spent on Jongdae’s belly, and by the way his spend stung against Jongdae’s skin.

“You will be mine now,” Min whispered, and kissed him.

“I can’t imagine why you want me,” Jongdae said. “So beautiful, like a muse brought to life.”

Min smiled at him, pushed fingers through his hair.

“And if I were? What would you do then?”

“Worship you with my body,” Jongdae said, “give you all my words.”

“And if that required a forfeit? What would you sacrifice?”

“Anything.”

The words stayed with him even as he curled around Min in his narrow, lumpy bed, watched Min’s face relax into sleep (and be no less beautiful for it). They nagged at him until he rose to pull on his wrinkled trousers and sit at his desk.

> You ask what I would sacrifice
> 
> to be released from this wordless cage:
> 
> for your eyes, I would pay any price.
> 
> Did you intend to so entice
> 
> me? By what measure do you gauge
> 
> when you ask what I will sacrifice?
> 
> Can devotion alone suffice?
> 
> Or do you require a harsher wage
> 
> for your eyes’ demanding price?
> 
> Oh, had I made you myself, your precise
> 
> beauty is the balm that can assuage
> 
> your asked-for sacrifice.
> 
> Tell me what forfeit, what device
> 
> you require: my heart, my life, words on a page?
> 
> For your eyes, I would pay any price.
> 
> Only show me to paradise:
> 
> the way past obscurity and age.
> 
> I will make the sacrifice,
> 
> for your eyes, pay my heart’s price.

“What’s this?” Min asked.

His hand curved over Jongdae’s shoulder; Jongdae leaned against his arm and sighed. To have loved, and written, and now rest his head against his lover: was there any moment better?

“You inspired another poem,” he said. “For months, I haven’t been able to write, and here in three days, you’ve inspired as many poems.”

“May I see?”

Shyness and pride warred with one another – but only briefly. Min had helped him make these poems. They belonged to him, as much as they belonged to anyone. Jongdae laid the three sheets out on the desk, in order. Watched Min’s hands, instead of his face, as he laid his chill, thin fingers on each page.

“Jongdae,” Min said. “Ah, my poet, you’ve done more even than I hoped.”

Before Jongdae could ask what that meant, he was caught again in the bottomless green of Min’s eyes.

“They’re for me, my own? I can have them?”

“I – of course,” Jongdae said.

“And not for anyone else?”

Jongdae stared.

“You mean not to publish them?”

Min was so still, unblinking, one hand on his arm.

What were poems for, if not to be read? They were the first things Jongdae had written in months, but his name was still sufficient that they would find publication. He would be able to stand on bar stages and in salons and read them with pride.

But Min had claimed him – and he was willing to be claimed. And if Min was his muse, if Min could draw words out of him as he drew pleasure out, then there would be more poems. So many more poems. These first ones could be Min’s alone. Jongdae could give them with an easy heart.

“Yes, of course. They’re yours,” Jongdae said.

Min reached down again and – pulled the words off the pages. Ink peeled up from the paper in spirals and swirls. Min gestured, and the words from the triolet wound together into a little ball. He swept his hand to the side, made a scooping motion, and the words from the rondel danced upward into the air and around the black ball hovering in the air. Min swept his hand again, and the words of the villanelle rose up, twined about one another, then bent around the ball of ink, now shiny and solid as a black pearl.

“What is this?” Jongdae said.

Min plucked the ball from the air with his fingers and popped it into his mouth, swallowed, and grinned.

“What a gift, my poet,” he said. “You’ve surely fed me for thrice-three turns of the moon.”

Jongdae tried to feel dread. He tried to pray. But he felt the marks of Min’s mouth on his skin.

“Jongdae,” Min said.

And Jongdae could find no prayers, because his soul belonged only to Min, as he had offered it.

“What are you?”

He had no fear in him, nothing left of God, but his voice could still carry the gravel of shock.

Min laid a cold hand on his cheek. The green of his eyes bled into the black of the midnight sky. Wings burst from his back – four of them, transparent, gold-veined, buzzing with the sound that had haunted Jongdae’s drunken dreams. Min’s hair and strange clothing were both the green of the dragonfly that had alighted on his hand.

Jongdae sank to his knees.

“What have I done?” he whispered.

“You have made yourself mine,” Min said.

Jongdae reached for terror but found no finger-hold, even as he gazed up into fathomless black eyes.

“You asked for poetry, and you have received it,” Min said. “You will find something close to eternity as well, by my side. For I will keep you, my poet. Your words and your body will feed me well, and in exchange I will show you wonders your mortal life cannot match.”

Min leaned down, and Jongdae clung to him. The part of Jongdae that wanted to recoil, to escape, was too small to control even his shaking hands. He was either lost or found: either way, his choice had been made before he knew it was done.

“Come home now,” Min said. “Enough of this dismal, paltry world.”

Yixing fielded a few questions from regulars about when Jongdae might return.

“I haven’t seen him,” Yixing said. “I’ve never known where he lives, perhaps try writing his publisher?”

But there was always a new poet, someone who shone like an infant star, and human memories were short.

“My inspiration has dried up and flown away like old varnish,” a painter said several months later, head down on the zinc of the bar. “I don’t know how to get it back.”

“Perhaps a change of scenery,” Yixing said.

“Maybe I should try absinthe, it worked for Manet,” the painter said.

He had hands the size of dinner plates and ears that would likely allow him to take flight. Yixing squinted at him, but even blurry, there was no shimmer around his form.

“The only magic about absinthe is its ability to make one absurdly drunk, and you can do that just as well on brandy,” Yixing said. “I don’t encourage such nonsense here.”


End file.
